


The End of a Circle

by Haldane



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-08
Updated: 2012-08-08
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haldane/pseuds/Haldane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where is the end of a circle?  In dealing with time, effects can become their own causes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End of a Circle

The grave was deeper than Jack had expected; certainly more than the classic six feet. It was far enough down that the earth felt cold under his back, where the pervasive damp was already creeping through his clothes. He stared up at Gray, but his brother was lost to him, face closed hard against any last-minute pleas he might make. 

Strange, Jack thought as his eyes moved to the other man standing awkwardly in the sunlight, how he actually knew John better than his own brother. He could see the conflict on John's face, and tried to let him know that it was all right. _It's not your fault_ , he sent towards John as best he could without being able to speak or move, those magic words that no one had ever given to him for the origin of this mess. He hid his amazement from Gray as John pulled a small ring from one finger and tossed it casually into the grave, landing it square on Jack's chest. Jack saw Gray's flash of suspicion, but John shrugged and Gray let it go.

Jack tried to hold his eyes open, desperately drinking in the clear blue sky that was all he could see, but the dirt falling in clods on his face made him flinch, and between one blink and another it was gone.

He died for the first time before John was even finished filling the hole.

=============

Stories exist wherever there are people, and the story soon spread that a noble man, a hero, had allowed himself to be buried alive to protect a certain meadow close to the sea. People came there to dream prophecies, to attempt healings, to lie together in the hope of begetting children. If they had kept formal statistics, perhaps the figures would have shown that the results were no better there than anywhere else, but they were no worse either. That was good enough to keep the myths circulating; people came and went, but over time they stayed, and the land gave them a living.

===========

Jack was aware of none of this. He revived only to die within minutes, and all he could do was try and keep his mind as calm as possible. He might well have gone mad, except that he always died before the horror of his situation had time to overwhelm his reason. He hung onto the same thoughts every time: for good or for evil, Gray was alive; John's ring on his chest was not only a promise but, more practically, a beacon, to lead help to him; and his team would never abandon him, no matter how long it took to find him.

Jack might have laughed at how Gray's own cruelty had backfired on him, had he air to breathe. John would cheerfully have killed Jack outright from sheer pique, but when Gray decided to force his cooperation John immediately set to work to actively sabotage his efforts. 

Jack had to hope that John wouldn't go to Torchwood for help and get shot before he could explain himself. On the other hand, John was pretty good at talking his way out of just such situations.

=============

As time passed, the revivals grew further apart. His moments of consciousness were so short that Jack was only vaguely aware of this, but the laws that controlled his gift were restricted by his inability to maintain life once it was restored.

Frustrated and trapped, the power of time and space shifted and surged irritably under the ground. The power flowed between Jack's head and his feet, flashed between his hands and swirled through the seven _charka_ points from the crown of his head to the base of his spine, finding no pattern that would allow it to fulfil its purpose.

The surges of power rubbed back and forth on the same place in the fabric of matter, and like continuous wear on any fabric weak parts began to yield. Small rips allowed tiny jets of excess pressure to escape, tearing holes as it went. They moved outwards in all directions, varying between lines as straight as a drop of water falling in a vacuum to twists beyond human comprehension. 

It was a thousand years before Jack felt the difference. His wakings were no longer than they had been - he was still buried in an airless blackness - but he could sense things outside of the physical press of his grave. He _knew_ that there was a flow of water in _that_ direction, and he was aware of the presence of people on the surface above him, not close and not distinctly, but a background feel of community. Jack would have cried with relief if he could; people meant Cardiff, and Cardiff meant hope. 

=============

The energies forming within Jack's grave continued to leak along their now established routes into the surrounding area. That side of the Bristol Channel always seemed to have more stories of ghosts and monsters, tales of people going missing only to return a hundred years later, and odd lucky charms that brought their owners wealth or good fortune.

The solid citizens on the south, English, side of the water put the stories down to the superstitious nature of their less educated Welsh cousins. Those more rustic folk would believe anything.

=============

When it dawned on Jack exactly what was happening he wished he had someone to share the perfect irony of it. He was in Cardiff because the Rift was here; the Rift was in Cardiff because Jack was here. The power of the Vortex constrained for so long at one point had torn open time and space.

Jack had long since worked out that John might have to go forwards a full two thousand years to get help from the only people who could possibly believe him. He was determined to wait out his time with a mind at peace. All he needed to believe was that rescue would come eventually; with that belief he could jerk back into life and die again with his sanity intact.

He had to admit that the longer and longer duration between revivals helped.

=============

When he heard the unmistakable sound of a steam train during one flicker of awareness, he almost broke completely at the thought that his penance might finally be drawing to an end. 

=============

The last thing Jack had expected was to be dug up by his own associates from Torchwood - a hundred years too early. They took him home, breaking off the manacles and allowing him to get clean and steal his own spare clothes. 

Every action took a strange mental effort to complete; his body had revived almost immediately once he'd been brought to the surface, but he'd lost the habit of thinking about such things as moving. He had to be called three times to come out of the showers; he was entranced by the droplets of water flowing down the tiled walls.

Planning how to keep himself out of his own timeline helped to bring his brain back into focus. This was work he knew, work he'd been trained for long before Gray had caught up to him. Hiding himself in the morgue was an obvious move, especially as he had to get out of sight before the current-era 'him' returned to the Hub.

Obvious was one thing; easy was quite another. Jack had spent almost two thousand years trapped immobile under the ground, and now he was faced being frozen and reburied after a bare two hours of life. His head knew that this time it should be easy, as he would not wake even once during the cryogenic suspension, but his gut screamed at him to run and hide and find another way to walk through normal time to 2008.

No. He had to be _inside_ the Hub to act against Gray. It still took every ounce of self control that he had to lie down in the chamber and give the nod, trying to hide his terror for the mere seconds that the process took to work.

He didn't tell the 1901-era staff that he was personally responsible for the formation of the Rift.

===========

Jack had reset his wristband before the freezing. It was the first thing he checked when consciousness returned, for once slowly like a normal awakening instead of the gasping shock of revivification. He grinned ferally at the readout; perfect timing. Time to make his presence known. Jack began to kick rhythmically at the foot of his box. 

Somebody was going to come and open the drawer. Hopefully Gray, because then Jack wouldn't have to go and find him. He was never going to give up on Gray, and he wasn't going to hurt him, but his brother couldn’t be allowed to do any more damage either. Jack would give him one more honest chance, but he wasn't fool enough to be thrust out of his life again.

He felt the morgue drawer beginning to slide open, and he looked up through the clear covering and saw his brother.

===========

In a shockingly short time the positions were exactly reversed. Now Jack was looking _down_ at Gray's face, set in the perfect stillness of cryogenic sleep. Jack's head spun with so much _change_ , after millennia of immobile silence under the earth. 

His head spun, and his heart ached. It had been so easy to take Gray down. Jack wondered if any of his little brother's original self was still in there - it was impossible that anyone totally corrupted would have allowed Jack close enough to physically sedate him, not after inflicting such suffering. Now his brother was safe, both from causing any more harm or from being harmed any further himself, but the price of that safety was isolation from any form of contact. Jack couldn't even touch him, let alone talk to him.

"It wasn't your fault."

Jack's heart stuttered in his chest. Ever since he was hardly more than a child himself it had been "Look out for Gray", and "Keep Gray out of trouble," followed by an endless litany of 'Where's Gray?" _Where's Gray? Where's Gray? Where's Gray?_. Even long after all the rest of his family and friends had died the voice had hammered against the inside of his skull, with him every single day.

He'd never heard the one line necessary to make it stop.

_It wasn't your fault._

Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or just curl up into a ball and hope the whole world would go away. Maybe this total confusion was only appropriate, since he heard the words now from a man who loved him and hated him, who had killed him and saved him and who still understood Jack better than anyone else ever had. John didn’t seem to expect any response, just waited quietly until Jack was done securing his brother's imprisonment, then withdrew with his usual sense of style, leaving a kiss and half a promise behind.

=========

There was a hell of a lot of work to do in order to put things back to rights. Torchwood was going to need more people, but Jack didn't hurry that process, needing to properly farewell their lost members first.

In good times, the circles grow large; in bad times when people are lost, the circles grow smaller again so the remaining members can support and comfort each other. Jack had read that somewhere, but he'd never felt it so personally before. He found himself working where he could see at least one of Gwen and Ianto, needing that reassurance. 

It would get better; Jack knew that. Torchwood would return to normal, not the same, but in a new pattern different but equally effective to the old one.

The next week, when the Rift decided to spit out an explosive ball of slime ten feet across, Jack decided he wouldn't explain about the Rift's origins to Torchwood's 2008 staff either.


End file.
